Sonder n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

The trainjinx strikes again

All good things come to an end, so did the wonderful weekend in Gotham also this time. We headed to the station with the hopes of having time for an ice-cream before my train left. As we were in the car there I got a message from the train company that my train was estimated to be one hour late. With my lesson learned from the last time I had a long delay on my train, we still headed to the station.

Of course, with an hour delay we had plenty of time for an ice-cream and it became clear that there would be no train set magically appearing this time around. My mother stayed with me for a while, then I was on my own and when the estimated time of departure arrived the time changed, again, and again, and again. It was with a real sense of relief I finally saw my train appear on the platform, one hour and 25 minutes after it was due to depart originally.As we all rushed on the train with the hopes of a hasty departure, we where once again let down as we didn’t depart right away, when the train finally started moving two hours had passed since the original departure time. The interesting thing with this story is that no other train seemed to be affected by the earlier accident (no more details were given on this accident by the staff on the train) and where running as normal. Only my train. If this is not due to the jinx, I don’t know what!

By this time I was super hungry and spent way too much money on a sad little sandwich, the diet coke came with me from mother dearest, and as I now have been upgraded within the SJ (Swedish railways) frequent traveler program, coffee is now free even when I’m not travelling first class. Yay! That’s twenty Swedish crowns of free semi-drinkable coffee.I made it home and managed to talk Mr Grumpy II into meeting me at the station to carry my heavy bag home. It’s always nicer when someone meet you when you been away, don’t you agree?